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10–15% is about the maximum amount of dead-weight employees (the kind who don't have the skills to perform the job-role they're hired for, who were hired due to
by derefr 4y ago
10–15% is about the maximum amount of dead-weight employees (the kind who don't have the skills to perform the job-role they're hired for, who were hired due to favoritism, bribes, blackmail, or pure hiring-process "throw a dart" laziness) you can have on a corporate balance sheet before the aggregate lack of expected productivity per OpEx dollar starts to be suspicious. The further below this limit a company is operating at, the 'safer' hiring managers can feel in making arbitrary/capricious decisions without being called out on them.
And so — presuming at least some hiring managers in each bigcorp are unethical and lazy or able to be manipulated — 10–15% dead-weight becomes an equilibrium point: the number of dead-weight employees asymptotically approaches 10–15%, where firing one means being able to hire one more, and hiring one means being unable to hire one more.
(Which isn't to suggest that there's top-down awareness in all these companies of these employees being dead-weight; rather the opposite — they survive because the structure of these companies has no continuous visibility into employee productivity. But when they consider layoffs, that's the time to do a point-in-time productivity audit... and that's when they find that this dead-weight has been accruing, and set out to burn it off. And, if they're smart, to also "burn off" the people who were willing to commit malfeasance by hiring/endorsing them.)
- synu 4y agoIt seems to me unlikely that they both couldn’t tell who was performing in normal times and then find them with surgical precision while panicking.
- derefr 4y agoHow so? You just don't bother to ask these questions, until you need to know the answers. The information is there at the leaf nodes of the org-chart; it's just not normally being propagated up to anyone who can do anything actionable with it. All it takes is asking the hard question, recursively.
- synu 4y agoI guess I just don’t believe the leaf nodes in your example actually know who isn’t performing, but had decided to keep them on the team for reasons. And that if they are asked, they will suddenly name names with pinpoint accuracy. In my experience, in this situation, the managers are clueless and figuring out what is actually going on is a hard problem.
- derefr 4y agoThink of it like this: you have direct reports who are awful at their jobs. You have no idea who hired these people; you just inherited them from their sociopath ex-manager (now promoted, per the Peter Principle) who hired them for bad reasons. However, the job is a very technically-complex job, where everyone is going to be awful at any new task for the first ~6 months of doing it. Just coming into this situation, you don't really know whether these people are not-good, or just not-good yet. You have a suspicion, but you don't want to air it, because you might be wrong — they might be trying and it might just be too early to see results yet — and there's no internal corporate zeitgeist of purging deadwood to give you any confidence in avoiding backlash if you are wrong. Later, that zeitgeist comes, and your boss's boss's boss asks your boss's boss, who asks you, to have the hard conversation with those direct reports you've been suspecting — and with their peers — to find out if they're actually making any progress in learning what's required to become productive, or whether they've just been bullshitting you. So you have that conversation, find out the ugly truth, and report it.